The matter of your brain

LOOKING at your own brain is a humbling and slightly unnerving experience. Mine, depicted in a freshly acquired MRI scan, is startlingly intricate, compact - and baffling. This is as much of a portrait of my own mind as I am ever likely to see. But to my ignorant eyes (which, by way of an eerie bonus, are now looking at their own cross-sections) it looks pretty much like any other brain.

Apparently a more expert eye wouldn't help. "Whilst all my participants get very excited about seeing their brain for the first time after being scanned, and I frequently get asked 'What can you tell me about my brain?', the reality is that the brain will for a long time yet remain a mysterious mass," says the neuroscientist who scanned my brain, for research purposes. "We must be content with knowing that the 'I' is constructed in its intricacies, but we cannot explain how.”

The hope of closing the gap between the physical and mental is presumably what gets neuroscientists up in the morning, but it’s frustrating for a layperson like me. Avowed materialist though I am, I nonetheless rebel against the knowledge that the impassive blob on screen is "me".

This cognitive dissonance was what I took with me to the opening of Brains, a new show at London’s Wellcome Collection, whose subtitle, "The Mind as Matter", suggests that its curators sympathise with my materialist perspective. “The neurosciences hold out the prospect of an objective account of consciousness - the soul or mind as nothing more than intricately connected flesh,” reads the introduction. But the bulk of the exhibition is dedicated to whole brains, brain collectors and anatomical paraphernalia, with little explicit reference to the brain’s fine structure, or how it might give rise to thought.

This remit is less restrictive than it might sound. Evolution has seen to it that the most vital of our bodily organs is well guarded against intrusion, and as a by-product, well hidden from inspection. Even today, only a small minority of the population have seen their own brains - and many (unlike me, thankfully) have done so only when they had reason to be fearful of what they found.

So the history of attempts to access, visualise and understand the brain is a rich one. But it’s also well worn, and some of the historical material - elaborate anatomical models, kooky phrenological busts and grim-looking surgical implements - is over-familiar. The scientific objects are more compelling, albeit they also tend to the grotesque - from the arachnid contraptions used to measure skull size to the spools of finely-sliced mouse-brains on tape.

Much of the fascination lies not in the objects themselves, but in the human stories behind them, told in captions whose straight-facedness sometimes comes across as drollery or clinical detachment. Trepanning tools fashioned from flint and animal teeth “would have taken longer to cut through the skull than more modern instruments”, one informs us drily; the American Anthropometric Society was “basically a club to enable the leading men of US science to dissect each other,” says another.

Secluded in the skull, individual brains develop relatively few distinguishing features save those given them by trauma, disease or rare accidents of birth. So brains of note tend to be associated with tales of misfortune. That’s often the case with anatomical specimens, but what’s remarkable about the brains on display here is how much they overlap with criminality. Some of the most striking have been acquired from people whose wickedness in life was deemed sufficient reason to deny them dignity in death. In other cases, the moral equation is reversed, with collectors stepping outside the bounds of decency in their desire to possess the brain; the abhorrent nadir being reached with the probable murder of "feeble" children by Nazi doctors.

(Image: Science Museum, London)

The collection’s examples of brains being voluntarily donated are equally remarkable. Persuading someone to donate this most personal of organs is a tough sell, and the historical portion of the exhibition makes much of how appeals to ego have persuaded the great and good to offer up their brains for post-mortem examination. More recently, medical study has provided motivation for would-be donors. Particularly poignant is the tale of Anita Newcomb McGee, a female US army surgeon who gave up her nine-month old son’s brain, along with a photograph and a sketch of his head, with the words “I want him to benefit the world in some way if possible.”

And one of the exhibition’s stand-out exhibits might provide further reassurance: a documentary video of anatomists at London's Hammersmith Hospital painstakingly and precisely slicing donated brains into half-centimetre wedges in near-silence. Or perhaps not. This is well sanctioned, respectful science being conducted on freely donated organs for the betterment of human health and knowledge; and yet it nonetheless provokes one of my fellow spectators into muttering, very much to herself: "Wrong, wrong, wrong". For myself, I find the video one of the most compelling exhibits - perhaps the only one that prompts me to contemplate offering myself up for more than a non-invasive scan in the service of medical science.

Less clear-cut, for me, are the nearby sections of Einstein's brain, preserved under deeply dubious circumstances after his death. Clearly, there's a certain fascination associated with perhaps the most famous brain there ever was; but Einstein's brain is no more legible than any other, and the slim prospect that scientific insights can be gleaned from its study seems poor recompense for the undignified proxying of a great mind by illicitly-obtained fragments of tissue.

(Image: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images)

The final insult: an accompanying 3D-printed replica of the entire organ, reconstructed for a TV documentary from archive photographs. This absurd resin relic epitomises, for me, the extent to which the objects on display at the Wellcome are imbued with significance by the knowledge that they were once the seats of consciousness. It’s the minds of the audience, rather than the brains on display, that are doing the work.

The Wellcome show confronts its visitors with the gulf between our hard-won knowledge about the form of the brain and our as-yet-meagre understanding of its function, much as my scan did to me. It didn’t narrow the gap between the grey image of my brain and my sense of self; if anything, it widened it. But it did make me appreciate what an amazing gap it is, and marvel anew at the work of those who are seeking to close it.

Well written. Now imagine looking at the MRI and seeing a small bright white blob appearing as the doctor clicks through the images. Quite a schock! Luckily not all those are lethal. Apparently lots of us have small lesions or tumors that we just have to live with.

Morgan
on March 30, 2012 8:03 PM

Are we really sure the mind comes from the brain and just the brain?
When I imagine myself, its the whole body/ Not just the brain.

Nathanael Yates
on April 3, 2012 9:29 AM

It is important to recognise that the body and senses are intergral to consciousness. You are right in saying that when you think of yourself that you think of your entire body. However it is your brain that unifies the perception of your body, making it a coherent whole. I you have ever considered the idea that you may be a brain in a vat connected to a bunch of electrodes then you may appreciate this idea. In the end however our brain is in just a vat, the body. And it is the body provides the conditions for our brain to survive.